It’s a low bar — or at least it should be — but if not reached, hunger will continue to ripple throughout our communities, leading to rising health and mental health challenges on an even grander scale than those we currently face. Despite living in one of the world’s most prosperous countries, more and more people are going hungry in Canada every day. That needs to change.
Thankfully, there are ways we can address this problem, and the group who joined the Janis Rotman Roundtable on Food Insecurity on February 10th, had no shortage of proposed solutions. Organized through the visionary support of Janis Rotman, one of FIFSW’s generous donors, the goal of the roundtable was to bring together an interdisciplinary group of food insecurity experts to discuss innovative solutions to this important societal problem and the role that social workers can play in addressing it.
Food insecurity has become an alarming and rapidly escalating crisis in Toronto. According to the 2024 Who’s Hungry report [PDF], published by the Daily Bread Food Bank and North York Harvest Food Bank, one in ten Torontonians now rely on food banks to survive. Since the pandemic in 2020, food bank usage in the city has risen an incredible 273%. Of those who use food banks, 31% are students, 59% have a post-secondary degree education, 80% are racialized, and 25% have a disability.
Social work practitioners, researchers, and policy makers have multiple touchpoints with food insecurity, both directly and indirectly. Examples that came up during discussion included working with clients who have been traumatized by scarcity, providing support to parents who are forgoing meals so that their children can eat, witnessing through research the use of food as a means of coercive control of migrants and refugees with precarious status, and tracking how stigmatization prevents people from accessing care and support in multiple areas, including food security. These and other examples highlight that food insecurity is not merely an issue of access to food but a critical social determinant of health, deeply intertwined with systemic inequities and broader social conditions.
The group’s ideas and insights underscored the importance of integrating understandings of poverty, food insecurity and food sovereignty into social work education, research, and outreach. Our curriculum’s emphasis on the social determinants of health and wellbeing provides a strong foundation for this work and we look forward to doing more.
Strengthening our knowledge and understanding of how others — including food bank organizations, public health researchers, and those working for front line agencies — are working to address food insecurity is vital. Convening interdisciplinary, cross-sector discussions and building stronger relationships with leaders in this area is key. As a faculty of social work, it is important that we support and amplify their work. It was an honour to host this day and connect with people who share a deep commitment to eradicating food insecurity and interconnected challenges.
In January of this year, the City of Toronto declared food insecurity an emergency, but it can’t fight this battle alone. Municipal, Federal and provincial governments need to work together to make eradicating hunger a priority and do their part to address it. With Canada’s federal election day fast approaching, our Roundtable experts argued that ending hunger should be a critical national issue and a key component of every platform.
“Food insecurity is not merely an issue of access to food but a critical social determinant of health, deeply intertwined with systemic inequities and broader social conditions.”
